It was Monday, June 13, 1988.

It was a gorgeous, sunny day. The first, pleasant hint of what was going to turn out to be a long, hot summer was seeping into the air.

Although we didn’t have a band going at the time, Bill the Drummer and I stayed friends. I’d occasionally drive over to the Band House to jam with one group of musicians or another, which was usually a great excuse to hang out at one of the bars in the area; Mondays were three-for-ones at Lyle’s (long before it was a hipster hangout); Wednesdays, we’d cadge $.50 drinks from girls at Ladies Night at the Uptown; Tuesdays were usually great nights to see and be seen at the CC Club and its a-friggin-mazing jukebox.

Monday was my night off from jocking. The service loved me; they had me working six nights a week. Typical; the job I loved, I couldn’t get arrested in. The job I hated, I was a raging success.

Life sucked.

Well, no. Not so much “sucked”, as “was very frustrating”.

And there’s nothing to blow away sucky frustration like a day at the range. Which is what I called up Bill to arrange, around 10AM.

———-

They say the most arrogant, rude, snooty, overly “enthusiastic” New Yorkers (or artists, or San Franciscans, or Greenies, or whatever) are the ones who come to it as adults. I don’t know that the same holds true for shooters – but Bill the Drummer would have been evidence of it.

Since his episode the previous spring – where he’d gotten mugged, and asked me to help him get into shooting – he’d become quite the gunny. Blessed with a $90/month rent payment, no car, almost no real bills and a job that paid decent tips, he had some disposable income (in that “living on a mattress in a converted three-season porch” kind of way). And for the previous couple of months, he’d spent it on shootin’ iron. He’d picked up…:

• An Enfield No. 4 Mk 1 – the classic British military rifle of the forties and fifties.
• A Colt M1911A1 – his father’s, from the war.
• A Walther P38 – one his father had brought home from the war. Like the Colt, I think he was happy one of his kids wanted to take it off his hands. Like a lot of combat veterans, he was deeply ambivalent about firearms.
• A Smith and Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum – a blued beauty with a five inch barrel.

I loaded up my car around lunchtime with my own arsenal – my Ljungmann (a WWII vintage Swedish rifle), my Remington Nylon .22, and my latest toy, a little .22 automatic pistol – and drove to Bill’s to load up his entire armory. Then it was off to Richfield Gun and Pawn for a grocery bag full of ammo, cleaning fluid and earplugs. Then, off to the range – “Moon Valley”, on the border between Eden Prairie and Chanhassen.

Of course, it took me nearly forty minutes to sort out the inscrutable maze of roads where 169, 494, Flying Cloud, Valley View and 212 all come together – a morass of concrete the bedevils me today, even after having worked at eight companies within three miles of that area in the past fifteen years – but eventually we got there.

———-

There are few better stress-relievers in life than sitting at the range on a gorgeous day, busting off caps. None of the better ones can be done without a person of the opposite sex along (or, y’know, the same, if you’re wired that way. Vive l’difference).

Part of it is the intensity of it all; you have to have your mind switched on, even when you’re just taking your spot on the line. If you don’t know that one dumb slipup can kill you, or someone else, you shouldn’t be there.

And shooting itself – the concentration, minding your breathing and the tension in your fingers and all the other factors – is all-engrossing, when you’re trying to hit a bulls-eye 200 yards away.

And it’s visceral. The sound of metal on metal and the implacable resistance as you pull the bolt carrier against the tension of the bolt return spring when you rack a round; the kick-to-the gut of the reports around you as other guns fire; the buildup of tension, the direct kick back to the shoulder (or the crease of your hand, with a pistol; the feeling of wrestling against the forces of physics to stay on target to get your next shot off quickly (if that’s what you’re trying to do); the smell of burned powder and hot oil and scorched brass, the taste of smoke – it consumes, and sometimes abuses, all five senses.

And the company is…well, interesting. Moon Valley catered to hard-core hunters, for the most part – guys from the third-tier ‘burbs who hailed from out back originally, who came in to zero their sights and practice up a little point shooting before they took to the field. They looked askance at some of the non-hunters – a guy who brought in an AK drew a scolding from the rangemaster when he busted off thirty rounds in a big hurry. The crowd wasn’t “gun nuts” – it was mostly marksmen.

And Bill and I. Although to be fair, after a little practice we were doing pretty well. I was hitting in the ring at 200 yards pretty nicely (20 years later, they all seem like the ten ring; grade my recollections accordingly).

———-

We hung out for 2-3 hours. We shot everything. I didn’t like the .44 Magnum one bit. And the P38 just felt wrong, and the SKS was kind of unpleasant. But I loved the Enfield – and my Ljungmann was a total hoot – a sweet-shooting darling of a rifle.

Finally, we ran out of ammo. We loaded up, and drove over to the Lyon’s Tap for what were, in their day, just about the best burgers ‘n cheap beer in the metro.

I dropped Bill and his arsenal off at the Band House, and drove home. 

Wyatt was waving goodbye to Teresa as I lugged my cases out of the car and into the house.  I hauled my guns up to my room, and taped a particulary impressive grouping to my bedroom door just for the fun of it. 

I grabbed my bike and turned around to take a little evening spin around Como as Allison – a petite, very underage blond that Wyatt kept letting into the various bars he bounced at – knocked at the front door. 

“Is Wyatt here?”

I rode until long, long after dark.